Yesterday California governor Gavin Newsom ordered all 40 million Californians to stay at home—effectively forcing all nonessential businesses in theCovid 19 pandemic in case of emergency cut this 2020 shirt What’s more,I will buy this state to close shop and residents to remain indoors. We can leave only to get groceries, supplies, or medicine and go outside only as long as we’re six feet from anyone else. San Francisco has been under a shelter-in-place edict since Monday, and the streets have been very quiet and the beaches and jogging paths along the bay very busy. (No one pays attention to the six-feet rule.) I’d shuttered the San Francisco and Marin locations of my women’s specialty store, Hero Shop, upon the announcement. But it took me a while to make it official (read: post it on Instagram). The news changed every minute. Not to mention I was having a very hard time with the messaging. How do you bridge the gap between “the world is ending, please stay safe” and “wait, look at this cute new Ganni dress that arrived yesterday”?

Nearly 85% of Hero Shop’s revenue comes from in-store purchases (as opposed to online sales or personal shopping). The idea of eliminating that stream for almost a month, while still having bills to pay, was crushing. All I could do was act. I had to tell my five part-time staffers to not come in and that essentially they were without a job for three weeks. They’d seen theCovid 19 pandemic in case of emergency cut this 2020 shirt What’s more,I will buy this news; they knew what was happening. Luckily they are mostly students working just a couple hours a week or have other sources of income. Though one did wonder—after talking to her friends who work in restaurants and bars, where the staff layoffs can be higher and much more dire—if I would lay her off so that she could collect unemployment. I told her I hoped to rehire her. Meanwhile, my only full-time employee, Haley, and I quickly consolidated inventory (easier to send out to clients that way), packed up whatever paperwork we’d need to work from home, shipped out packages being sent to clients on approval, and repeated over and over to each other, “What the fuck.”